On a quiet Friday this month, Osbourne Bodden, the owner of the Grape Tree Cafe, surveyed the scene on the beach in front of his Bodden Town property.
Thick mats of scruffy seaweed clotted the shoreline.
“It is unhealthy. It’s unsightly. It stinks,” said Bodden, a former environment minister.
“This is not good for tourists, it is not good for business, and it is not good for residents.”
Sargassum inundated some of Cayman’s shores throughout September – sparing leeward-facing Seven Mile Beach – and Bodden voiced the frustrations of business owners all along the south and east coasts in a Facebook video that doubled as a call to action.
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He was speaking just days after Sustainability Minister Katherine Ebanks-Wilks told Parliament government was working on a draft national plan to deal with the seaweed inundations.
Bodden said similar promises had been made for over a decade.
He suggested Cayman was being left behind as the rest of the region has started to turn the brown menace into a blue economy.
The story of the Caribbean region’s battle with the growing mass of sargassum washing up on its once pristine beaches suggests that the countries with most to lose have been quickest to act.
In 2018, the Mexican state of Quintana Roo declared a state of emergency in response to the devastating impact of sargassum on its economy.
The navy has been drafted in to collect the seaweed, and barriers now protect an estimated 60 miles of coastline.
Scientists in Florida are using high-definition satellite imagery to track the “great Atlantic sargassum belt” and provide early warning systems to impacted coastal communities.
Entrepreneurs across the region are also experimenting with use cases for the sudden influx of what is, in basic economic terms, an unpromising raw material.
In Barbados, a company is combining collected sargassum with the by-product of rum production to produce fuel that can power vehicles. In St. Lucia, a biotech company turns the seaweed into fertiliser. And, in the Yucatán Peninsula, affordable homes have been built with bricks made from dried sargassum.
Scientists and industry insiders characterise those businesses as small and exploratory.
And they believe significant research and investment is needed to help create a sustainable economy that would provide the necessary incentive to collect sargassum before it hits the beaches.
Rosa Rodríguez, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico based in Puerto Morelos, and one of the experts on the front lines of Mexico’s seaweed crisis, warns that even the leading nations in the fight against sargassum are losing ground.
“We are way behind, considering the magnitude of the event,” she said.
“A massive amount of organic matter is decomposing on our shorelines and the volume is increasing significantly every year.”
Mapping the problem
No one can picture the magnitude of the event quite as precisely as Brian Barnes.
From his lab at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science in St. Petersburg, the assistant research professor monitors the growth and distribution of the “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt” using satellite imagery.
The technology is sophisticated enough to create a real-time map of sargassum distribution across the Atlantic.
Combined with data on wind and currents, it can be used to forecast when and where sargassum will come ashore. A warning system is already running for the Florida Keys and is being built for Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
The sargassum belt was virtually non-existent before 2011. Fuelled by fertiliser run-off from the Amazon and Congo rivers, the naturally occurring weed has grown exponentially since then.
Barnes said 2025 was the worst year on record. This year was actually marginally less severe in terms of the overall biomass. But the impact was worse because greater amounts landed on the beaches.
“Most sargassum stays offshore. The vast majority of it will never come onto land.”
Overall, he said, the volume of sargassum in the Atlantic at peak times was 40 times higher than it was a decade ago,
Annalisa Bracco, an oceanographer and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, led a breakthrough 2026 study exploring the changing drivers of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.
The core conclusion of that research is that growth is no longer driven by agricultural run-off and there is now a self-sustaining “sargassumsphere.”
She said, “This stuff, at this point, is just living out of itself, so it’s going to stay.”
Putting up the barricades
In the Dominican Republic, hoteliers have already come to terms with that reality.
Jake Kheel, vice president of sustainability at Grupo Puntacana Foundation, said it had been clear from 2015 on that a long-term strategy was needed.
For the tourism industry, that means a wall of floating offshore booms that contain sargassum before it hits the coastline.
The business, which has multiple hotels and an airport on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, now has its own plant to assemble and deploy barriers.
To begin with, Kheel says, it was possible to view the problem as a sporadic, occasional menace, somewhat like Cayman suffers now. Not anymore.
Sargassum arrives daily from April to October and the barriers are in the water year-round.
“Monday looks like Tuesday looks like Wednesday to me,” he said.
There has been interest in Cayman in following a similar approach.
Michael Tibbetts, who owns Little Cayman Beach Resort and Cayman Brac Beach Resort, as well as the Solterra resort in Turks and Caicos, where Kheel sits on the board, sought his advice after seeing the barriers in action.
He went as far as bringing a Danish engineer to Little Cayman three years ago to assess the possibilities of a barrier system to protect South Hole Sound.
But he concluded the problem was too large for a single resort to solve.
“If you put a barrier around your property, it’s going to affect your neighbours and make it worse for them,” Tibbetts said.
“That’s the role of government to coordinate.”
He presented proposals to government in 2023 and has helped to repurpose them into a white paper, calling for a system of barriers and boats to intercept sargassum before it crosses the reef.
From Kheel’s perspective, Cayman has been slow to act.
He suggests that may be because the scale of the problem isn’t quite as extreme and the economic pain is not felt as sharply as on islands whose entire economy depends on tourism.
Though he believes the Dominican Republic and Mexico are further ahead than other regions, the growth of the problem is a concern.
And it is not clear how long barriers will be enough to keep the inundation at bay.
“I would say that there’s definitely been a lot of progress. I wouldn’t say we’re on the cusp of solving this thing,” Kheel said.
While he has hopes for the emerging economy around sargassum-based products, he believes a thriving industry is still a long way off.
“It’s a little bit like chicken and the egg … in order to build a scaled business around sargassum, you have to be able to get the sargassum consistently. And, in order to make it worthwhile to collect the sargassum consistently, you have to have somebody willing to buy it.”
Bricks and fuel
Across the region, efforts to turn sargassum into a product remain largely a cottage industry.
Bracco said there were several attempts in motion to find use cases, and that her study, which shows the bloom is now self-sustaining, should fuel further research.
“It’s not going away, and it’s costing a lot of money. It makes sense to start thinking of investing funds to find a way of using it,” she said.
In Barbados, washed sargassum is mixed with leftovers from rum-making and fed to black soldier fly larvae to make biofuel for vehicles.
“They grow about 200 times in a couple of weeks,” Bracco said.
“They are full of fat and oil. Then you kill them, and you have your oil very quickly, very easily, very cheaply.”
Rodríguez said the sargassum economy in Mexico and across the region was still small and experimental.
She said some companies are producing biomaterials for plants and bricks for low-income housing, but in volumes too small to make a dent. She believes 90% of what washes ashore is either left uncollected or sent to landfill.
Making it pay
The majority of experts interviewed for this story agreed that turning sargassum into a commodity is necessary in order to create the financial incentive to remove it.
“In order for … the region to deal with the problem, you have to create value from the sargassum. Otherwise, it’s just cost and cost and cost,” said Geoff Chapin, co-founder and CEO of Carbonwave, a public benefit corporation that operates a biorefinery in Puerto Morelos on Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
He shares some of the caution about the emerging “blue economy” around the seaweed.
“There’s a lot of good stories, but there are very few proven, scaled products out there,” he said.
“In our six years, we’ve looked at about 50 different possible use cases for sargassum, and only a few are technologically and economically possible.”
The company’s collection arm, Grupo Ensol, installs barriers for hotels, then collects the seaweed from behind them. The Mexican Navy also delivers fresh sargassum from its collection vessels.
Its main marketable product is a concentrated liquid extract called Sarga Power, a biofertiliser that is now sold to farmers in Mexico and the US, which has shown yield increases on crops of up to 20%.
“It is one of the few or only large-scale products sold into global markets from sargassum,” Chapin said.
The process of extracting the liquid is complex and involves proprietary technology for removing the arsenic that builds up in sargassum. It also leaves a solid pulp behind, which still needs a use.
Carbonwave has made pavers for resort walkways, a cosmetic emulsifier and a prototype leather alternative, and sells dried pulp to smaller companies developing their own products.
The company is developing smaller processing units that could be placed on individual islands to help feed the business and scale up the solution. Each would press the liquid from locally collected sargassum and ship it to Carbonwave to be refined into Sarga Power. The pulp would stay on the island for local uses, such as building materials.
“Imagine a bit of a hub-and-spoke model where all that raw juice comes to us,” he said.
“The region can benefit because they can contribute to that supply chain and get real value from it, and the pulp can be used locally for other use cases.”
The company is also open to licensing its technology. Chapin said the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group, had invested in Carbonwave and wants to provide “tens of millions of dollars of low-cost debt” to help expand to other island nations, including the Dominican Republic.
He can see a future where Cayman is part of that network, carrying out the first stage of processing on-island and shipping the liquid to Carbonwave, with the pulp supporting a small-scale local industry.
But the island still lags behind much of the region in that it doesn’t have barriers or a collection process. Most sargassum-derived products require the seaweed to be collected in the water.
What’s next for Cayman
Cayman’s government says that is changing. Sustainability Minister Ebanks-Wilks told Parliament on 5 Oct. that her ministry is working on a draft National Sargassum Response Plan with a stronger emphasis on prevention.
She said government was looking at a barrier system and potentially a boat to remove the seaweed, which she described as one of the most effective methods seen in the Caribbean, and that a procurement process would follow in the near future.
Pressed by George Town Central MP Kenneth Bryan, who noted the plan had been in the works for the 18 months, she said she would give a “firm time frame” when Parliament sits in November.
For Bodden and the others in the eastern districts, the wait for an answer to a problem that blights their businesses and neighbourhoods year after year has gone on too long. He said Cayman had been talking about making a plan for years while others had acted.
“Solutions exist around the world. Right next door, Mexico and Dominican Republic have systems that deal with this and make use of the product instead of hurting people,” Bodden said.
“In East End and Breakers, down through Bodden Town into South Sound, it is simply unbearable. And I’m calling on government to address the situation sooner than later.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 23, 2026, Page 23. Open PDF version